Friday, January 27, 2017

Meet the new boss, same as old boss

Google is full of surprises, aren't they?

Less than three months after they've unveiled the new, redesigned Payments Center, they've discontinued it and moved the functionality to the Play developer console. And it's not like they've moved the same pages to a different host; this is a redesign, both the internals and the UI are noticeably different, with some functionality removed, and some new bugs introduced.

On the brighter side, the new UI is more scrape friendly. It's still JavaScript-driven, with explicit protection against HTTP-only scraping. On the other hand, there's a very straightforward AJAX call that returns JSON with almost all I need to capture the order activity.

There's a glaring exception though. The November 2016 version of the Payments Center would expose a crucial number - estimated revenue in USD (more generally, the payout currency). Not anymore. Unless the order was in USD to begin with, there's no way of knowing what's my take until the end of the month.